About selecting colors

You can
select colors for your artwork from a variety of tools, panels,
and dialog boxes in Illustrator. How you select color depends on
the needs of your artwork. For example, if you want to use specific
company-approved colors, you’ll want to select colors from the company-approved
swatch library. If you want to match your colors with colors in
other artwork, you can use the eyedropper or the Color Picker and
enter exact color values.

You can use any of the following features for selecting color:

Swatches panel and swatch library panels

Provide
individual colors and color groups. You can choose from preexisting
swatches and libraries or create your own. You can also import libraries.

Color Picker

Provides
a color spectrum from which you can visually select colors, color
value text boxes for manually defining colors, and color swatches.

Eyedropper tool

Samples
colors from your artwork when you click.

Color panel

Provides
a color spectrum, individual color value sliders (such as a Cyan
slider), and color value text boxes. You can specify fill and stroke
colors from the Color panel. From the Color panel menu, you can
create inverse and complementary colors for the current fill or
stroke color, and create a swatch from the selected color.

Color Guide panel

Provides
several harmony rules to choose from for creating color groups using
a base color that you choose. You can create variations of colors
using tints and shades, warm and cool colors, or vivid and muted
colors. From this panel, you can open a color group in the Edit
Colors/Recolor Artwork dialog box.

Edit Colors/Recolor Artwork dialog box

Part
of this dialog box provides tools for precisely defining or adjusting
the colors in a color group or artwork. The other part lets you
recolor your artwork using the colors from a color group, or reduce
or convert your colors for output.

Add Selected Colors command or New Color Group
button

Create a color group containing the colors in selected artwork.
This command and button are both located in the Swatches panel.

Color Picker overview

The
Color Picker lets you select an object’s fill or stroke color by
choosing from a color field and spectrum, defining colors numerically,
or clicking a swatch.

View color swatches instead of
the color spectrum

Select colors using the Color Picker

Click or drag inside the color spectrum. A circular marker
indicates the color’s position in the spectrum.

Drag the triangles along the color slider or click inside
the color slider.

Enter values in any of the text boxes.

Click Color Swatches, select a swatch, and click OK.

Color panel overview

You use
the Color panel (Window > Color) to apply color to an
object’s fill and stroke, and also to edit and mix colors. The Color
panel can display color values using different color models. By
default, only the most commonly used options are visible in the
Color panel.

Change the color model

Show all options in the panel

Select Show Options from the panel menu. Alternatively,
click the double triangle on the panel’s tab to cycle through the
display sizes.

Select colors using the Color panel

Select
the color mode you want to use from the panel menu. The mode you select
affects only the display of the Color panel; it does not change
the color mode of the document.

Do one of the following:

Drag or click in a
slider.

Shift-drag a color slider to move the other sliders in relation
to it (except for HSB sliders). This keeps a similar color but with
a different tint or intensity.

Enter values in any of the text boxes.

Click in the color spectrum bar at the bottom of the panel.
To select no color, click the None box at the left of the color
bar; to select white, click the white swatch at the upper-right
corner of the color bar; to select black, click the black swatch
at the lower-right corner of the color bar.